


The Time Traveller's Curse

by HogwartsDuchess (NephthysMoon)



Series: Of Hurricanes and Butterfly Wings [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Hermione & Lily BFFs, I IGNORE POTTERMORE, It's a bad idea, M/M, Not Pottermore Compliant, Really really bad, They Are Kids, Time Travelling Hermione Granger, Warning: this fic attempted to fit in with canon, basically pairings are going to change up a lot, but canon was a cliquey bitch who couldn’t play nice with others, hell I also ignore canon quite frequently, how do tag, kids don't usually find their future spouse, let me say that again for the people in the back, not that young, so this fic told canon to fuck off and started doing its own thing., teenagers being teenagers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24093631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NephthysMoon/pseuds/HogwartsDuchess
Summary: Hermione Granger is dropped under the destroyed cabinet of Time Turners in the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, her life hanging somewhere between life and death. And that's before she wakes up.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore & Hermione Granger, Hermione Granger & Lily Evans Potter, Hermione Granger & Marauders, Hermione Granger/James Potter
Series: Of Hurricanes and Butterfly Wings [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738249
Comments: 6
Kudos: 54





	The Time Traveller's Curse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nyruserra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nyruserra/gifts).



> This is another version of what I've come to call in my head 'Time Travel Hermione' (TTH). It is one of the original versions, and closest to the original premise I came up with all those years ago. I started it in 2014 for NaNo, and - well, you guys have seen at least one other incarnation of this story. This one has about 30k written on it, but it also flows the easiest for me, most days, so I'd expect updates are going to be more frequent than other versions.

Harry Potter watched in a sort of stupefied amazement as Neville Longbottom attempted to pick up the injured and unconscious Hermione Granger and sling her over his shoulders, the cabinet of Time Turners of all shapes and sizes falling and repairing itself just behind him as Neville staggered under the weight of their friend. He let loose a shout, “Watch out!”

It was too late. The limp – _please don’t let her be dead_ – form of one of his best friends seemed to hang suspended in the air for a moment before falling to the ground with a wicked thud. The cabinet, which had just finished repairing itself, crashed down around her as he ran to pull her from under it, and her small body was pelted, for a few moments, by the broken glass and sand, before the cabinet righted itself, the shards of glass reforming around the crystalline sand and settling themselves back on the shelves.

Hermione Granger was nowhere to be seen.

He wanted to scream, to throw the world’s largest tantrum even as his mind tried to process what had just happened, but the door at the other end of the room burst open, and there was no time to think about Hermione.

Later – when his godfather was dead and he was sitting alone in Dumbledore’s office, waiting for the Headmaster to appear – he would have plenty of time to think about Hermione. About her smile, her cleverness, the way she’d tried to stop him from going to the Ministry in the first place.

_My fault. This is all my fault. If I'd just listened to Hermione, she’d still be here – and so would Sirius. It’s all my fault._

* * *

Janus Croaker was not as young as he liked to think of himself, nor was he quite as old as his fellow Unspeakables believed him to be. If he were forced to put a name to it, he’d call himself comfortably middle-aged. He certainly wasn’t nearly as old as Dumbledore, though he had started Hogwarts the same year Albus had begun teaching, back when he was still a nobody of the Wizarding World, a brand new Transfiguration Professor who would grow into someone that others feared and respected in equal measure.

Janus’ mind had a tendency to wander a bit, particularly late in the evening when he was making the long walk between the Motherhouse and the Department, but he had been working on a special project just before he’d gone into supper, and a stroke of brilliance (at least he hoped so) had come to him just as he’d gotten settled into his favourite leather chair in the fourth floor library (which was as different from the libraries on the ground, first, second, and third floors as they were from each other) and he had decided to put his book down and take the lift to the long hallway that separated the Motherhouse and the Department to see how the idea panned out in practice.

Before his promotion to Head of the Department, Janus had worked in nearly every branch, and when he was made Department Head two years previously, he’d started some experiments that the previous Head hadn’t allowed. Particularly in the Time branch. Janus had always been fascinated by the study of Time; the Time Turner, for example, had caught his fancy decades ago, and he’d made it his life’s work to study the ramifications of long-distance Time travel. Oh, the Ministry had given up the practical study over a century before, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t posit theories, particularly when Muggle scientists (he had long since decided that scientists were the Muggle equivalent of Unspeakables) were doing the same, in their own fashion, without the benefit of magic. He'd been so thrilled by the passing mention he’d overheard in the hallways that he’d run out to subscribe to several Muggle scientific journals to keep abreast of the latest knowledge. His Muggle counterparts were still a long way from understanding the basics, not having been gifted with the experience, but he found he was still able to follow their logic (and experiments) through to a conclusion they could only hope to reach, with their limitations. He would dearly love to sit and talk to some well-educated Muggles about his own theories, but he knew the likelihood of that happening were as slim as the Cannons ever pulling themselves from last in the league.

Still, he made his ponderous way from the Motherhouse to the Department, shuffling his feet as he walked, deep in thought, only to stop just inside the door of the Time Room, overcome by wariness. There was a large magical disturbance in the air, and the temporal harmonics were completely out of alignment. He'd read about the sort of disturbance he sensed, but never experienced it; the last time it had happened, to his knowledge, the Ministry had discontinued the practical study of time travel. He waved his wand to illuminate the room, and the torches flared to life along the walls as his eyes darted from surface to surface, visually inspecting all of the current projects to ensure that nothing was out of place. He saw nothing amiss, but the temporal harmonics were growing more powerfully out of tune; his hair stood on end and the air itself crackled with magic.

Carefully, he approached the bench that held his project, all thoughts on his work (brilliant or mundane) completely forgotten in the unsettling atmosphere of the workroom. He was almost to the bench, approaching the cabinet that housed the Department’s collection of Time Turners, when he tripped over something solid and slightly squishy in his path and landed in a most undignified heap across it.

No, Janus Croaker was certainly not as young as he used to be, he decided as he pushed himself to his feet and looked down to see what had tripped him up – rookie mistake, that, looking on the desks and not the floor. He peered down at the dark lump on the floor and muttered as spell to brighten the lights in the room, because surely it couldn’t be what he thought it was. However, the harsher glow of the torches did not disabuse him of the notion, and he knelt beside the shape, sucking his breath in on a hiss as he took in his ‘attacker’.

“Now, how the devil did you get here?” he murmured, brushing the long, wild brown curls away from the dirty face. The girl on the floor couldn’t be more than seventeen, and looked like she’d been through the wringer. Her robes were torn and dirty, but he recognised the Hogwarts crest and shook his head. “Nothing more than a child, and an injured one, at that,” he barely breathed.

He attempted to roll the girl over to her back, but got distracted by a slight tinkle – almost like that of glass hitting stone. He lit the end of his wand and brought his face nearer to the floor where the girl was laying, eyes squinting as he struggled to find what had made the noise. There, by her head, was a flash of light, just a small one – he reached for it, holding the little sliver carefully between thumb and forefinger as he examined it in the glow of his wand. Yes, yes, exactly as he’d thought, a small shard of glass.

His nostrils flared for a moment as his eyes widened, darting between the injured girl and the small shard of what appeared to be glass in his hand – could it be? The temporal harmonics – the magical displacement he’d felt as he walked into the room – was it at all possible that the shard wasn’t glass, but crystal? His gaze fell on the cabinet, and he jumped to his feet.

“Merlin’s pants!” he whispered, loathe to disturb the girl, even in his current mental state. As carefully as he could, he levitated her from the floor and shook his head. “Albus Dumbledore is missing a student tonight – I wonder if he knows it yet.” Grasping the girl’s hand as gently as he could, Janus pulled his emergency Portkey from the chain around his neck and slipped it between their clasped hands. He tapped it with his wand, nonverbally giving it a direction and forcing himself to hold on to the girl as they were pulled from the Department and across the Island.

Most of the wizarding world was ignorant of the knowledge that Janus Croaker, upon his graduation from Hogwarts, had become friendly with the then-Professor of Transfiguration – and even those that weren’t would have been surprised to know that, since an incident involving Dumbledore that would have been suspicious had anyone else discovered it, Janus was one of the few people that Albus had given access to Hogwarts, day or night. Janus had never taken sanctuary at Hogwarts, though he did like to drop in for a spot of tea and a sherbet lemon from time to time. The two men would debate magical theory into the wee hours and generally comport themselves as though they were much younger than their respective ages.

It was for that reason that Albus, feeling the shiver that crossed his skin as the wards alerted him to Janus’ imminent arrival, perked up considerably. He wasn’t that old, at least, not by wizarding standards, but there were days he wondered if he was quite young enough to keep up with the changing youth of Hogwarts, their lives and foibles, especially given his own rather shaded past and the upcoming war. To say he’d been brooding when the wards tingled would perhaps be an overstatement, though only slightly. He rather thought sharing some elf-made wine and a game of chess with his old friend while they compared Muggle science to what passed for it in the magical world was just the ticket out of the doldrums the upcoming holiday had him in.

He certainly didn’t expect Janus to arrive in a heap in front of his desk with a much smaller form cradled gently in his arms, the Hogwarts crest painfully obvious against the black work robes. Hogwarts herself came to attention at their arrival, sending him a brief wave of comfort and letting him know that despite appearance, all of his students were present and accounted for – though there was also a warning that the usual suspects were roaming the school instead of tucked safely away in bed.

“Janus, what in the name of all Morgana holds sacred have you got there?” he asked, his curiosity piqued.

To his dismay, Janus didn’t answer him, at least not directly. “I believe we need the Hospital Wing, Albus. I suspect this young lady is in desperate need of Madam Pomfrey’s attention.”

“Of course, old friend, of course,” he replied cheerfully. He stood from his desk and crossed the room to his fireplace, asking Poppy to please come through the Floo.

A moment later the bustling matron of the Hogwarts Hospital Wing stepped through his fireplace, dusting off soot. “Albus, if you’ve called me here because you’ve had too many sweets and upset your stomach again, I will hex you where you stand,” she threatened, before looking up and seeing the rather curious tableau in front of her.

“Ah, Madam Pomfrey,” Janus said, “I came upon this young lady less than an hour ago and thought she might be in need of your services.” To Albus he said, “I believe you’re missing a student?”

One snow-white eyebrow shot up at that, but he nodded. “It does appear so,” he agreed, looking at the crest on the girl’s robes again. “However, the castle has informed me that all are currently tucked in their beds, save for four young rascals that prefer exploration to sleep,” he added with twinkling eyes and a chuckle. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he breathed, leaning towards the child in Janus’ arms. “Poppy?”

Said witch looked more than a mite put out with him, but she whipped out her wand, ran a quick diagnostic charm over the girl, and nodded rapidly when she got the results. “Whippy,” she called, and the elf that served as her aide in the Hospital Wing appeared with a crack. “Take this young lady and put her in the small area we have set up for privacy in the back, please.”

Without a word, the elf snapped its fingers, and girl and magical creature disappeared.

The three adults followed along a moment later by Floo to find that Whippy had placed the girl on the bed and arranged her limbs comfortably. A flick of the Mediwitch’s wand later, and ugly green screens cordoned the area off from prying eyes. A swish stretched them from floor to ceiling and an additional flick layered them with privacy spells so necessary for keeping a patient’s medical details a secret. Once the four of them were cocooned in, Poppy waved her wand over the girl again, looked over the standard diagnostic she’d cast in the Head’s office, and frowned. She waved it again, and a second, more detailed report scratched itself across a roll of parchment that had appeared with the second, more powerful and detailed spell.

Albus tried to be discreet as he peered at the parchment, but he was only able to catch the patient’s name before Poppy scowled at him and summoned the scroll to her. Albus let her have the illusion of medical privacy, for he had what he wanted from the second spell: the girl’s name. And with her name being so distinctive, he was quite positive the girl was not on the magical registry, and certainly not attending Hogwarts – so who was this strange girl, and how had Janus come to find her?

Poppy echoed his thoughts almost immediately. “Croaker, I’m going to need you to tell me where and how you discovered this girl, because she’s covered in something quite impossible.”

“Temporal energy,” Janus breathed, and Albus sucked in a breath at it. “I was working late and tripped over her. What do you know of Time Turners?”

Albus nearly answered, so caught up in the possibilities he hadn’t noticed the question wasn’t put to him, but Poppy cut off his train of thought before it could derail into actual babbling. “The standard, I assume,” she said. “Given that we usually have one or two every year that are so ambitious they try to take all the electives. The ones that drop classes and return the Time Turner are generally marked down as being Head Boy or Girl for their year, while the ones that try to stick it out all year generally end up right where this young lady is, from exhaustion or nervous breakdowns. They’re also generally covered in temporal magic, but nothing to the extent this girl is.”

“Well summarized, thank you,” Janus said, holding out a hand to stop Albus from going more in depth than they needed to at this moment. “As you’re well-aware, the Ministry stopped the practical study of Time for centuries before giving it up around the time our esteemed Headmaster here was born. The studies that were done showed deleterious side-effects for both the traveler and the timestream if one used the device to repeat more than five hours. They were regulated, and the formula to create them was destroyed. Horrible things have happened to those who meddle with time, but where the Ministry and I often disagree is whether it was the time travel itself that was dangerous, or the insistence that those witches and wizards, finding themselves in a time not their own, on returning to the familiar comforts of home. In fact, to my knowledge, not a single study was conducted where one simply travelled to the past and stayed there. No, they all insisted on using the Time Turner to come home, aging every second between the time they were in and the time they were from.”

“Rather like that one extraordinary case of the woman who travelled five hundred years into her past and died of extreme old age upon her return,” Albus added. It was a story they told to every single student issued a Time Turner to deter them from going back more than the regulated five hours.

“What has this to do with my patient?” Poppy snapped, pulling their attention back to her and the girl laying on the bed.

“When I found her, she was in a heap in front of a cabinet full of Time Turners and had, upon her person, a fine powder and several shards of crystal, which I have removed for analysis,” he said. “In short, I suspect your patient somehow came to be in the path of at least one, possibly more, broken Time Turners.”

Albus nodded; it was the only thing that made sense. What to do with the girl, though? Was she from the future or the past? He didn’t recall the name Hermione having surfaced in his own school years, nor during any that he had been a Professor or Headmaster, so unless the girl had passed through Hogwarts during the interim years, she was not from his lifetime at Hogwarts. He nodded absently as Poppy dismissed them with a short promise to join them as soon as her patient was stabilized.

How long before she woke? When had she come from? What, if anything, did she know of Tom? It was impossible to know; it was impossible to not know. When he and Janus reached his office and taken their usual seats in his well-apportioned sitting room, he voiced at least one of his questions.

“What are your thoughts on our guest?” he asked his old friend.

Janus took a small sip of tea from the cup a cheerful elf had delivered moments before, and frowned in thought. Albus smiled; it was so very much like his friend to gather his thoughts before speaking. Janus was still every inch the Ravenclaw he’d been in school.

“Obviously the girl comes from the future. Time Turners, if you’ll recall, were enchanted to only move in one direction after the Ministry abandoned the practical study of time,” he finally said, his words slow and deliberate. Albus nodded. He’d forgotten that tidbit, and his excitement rose at the confirmation that this girl must be a future Hogwarts student. “How far in the future is, at this moment, a matter of guessing, I suppose,” Janus continued, before pausing again. Albus allowed him to frame his next thought, knowing that anything the other man said would be relevant. The silence dragged on as Janus appeared to weigh his next words very carefully indeed.

While Janus collected his thoughts, Albus summoned the Book of Admittance and tapped it with his wand, searching for any magical children named Hermione Granger; it was possible that the girl was already born and had not received her Hogwarts letter yet in this time. He was unsurprised when the Book was unable to locate the girl; she may not have been born, or may not yet have shown sufficient magical proof for the Quill to recognize her for admittance.

Finally, Janus spoke. “There is a Muggle theory that goes in direct opposition to what we, as magicals, have believed about time travel for all these years.” Albus nodded again; they had spoken before of the possibility that everything wizards believed about time travel was incorrect, despite having lived it. “If we attempt, through means of modifying a Time Turner, to send the girl home, all of the days between this day and that will pass for her in the time it takes the hourglass to stop spinning. But if we do not, her presence here could completely destabilize the present she comes from. There may be a rash of unbirths from it, and she, herself, may never be born; there’s no predicting how that particular unbirth would affect her presence here. Until we know when she came from, I hesitate to speculate too much, Albus,” Janus said, “but if she is not too far out of her own time, I believe we should make every effort to return her home.”

“At what threshold would you consider ‘too far’?” Albus asked with the air of one expressing a mild curiosity towards the subject. “Her name is not yet down in the Book of Admittance, which indicates that she is either not yet born or perhaps has not yet performed her first accidental magic.”

Janus looked troubled at that; it was as Albus suspected, the girl was ‘too far’ into her own past for Janus to be comfortable sending her back. “If she’s not yet born, her magic may lock her into place in our timestream, but if she’s a magical child that has already been born, her first magical act in this timestream could drain the magic of her counterpart, rendering the infant a Squib, at best.” His voice was grave, and their eyes locked.

“A magical child drained thusly could die from a strong wind,” Albus acknowledged. “Would the death of the infant have deleterious effects on the half-grown girl in the Hospital Wing?”

“There’s no way to know,” Janus admitted. “Not with what I’ve been allowed, by the Ministry, to test. She could simply pop out of existence, or the magic could stabilize her into this timestream permanently. There is, to my almost certain knowledge, no precedent for this. All our records indicate that any traveler who had made an error such as this simply chose to come home, regardless of the consequences.” He paused, and Albus suspected he was finally going to speak to the heart of the matter; he was not disappointed. “Of course, her presence here, if not removed, could create something of an alternate reality. For everyone around her, it would be the only reality, and the timestream she left would continue on without her or perhaps even fade from existence, collapsing upon itself.” He continued, as though speaking to himself, “There has even been some debate, that the feeling known as déjà vu is nothing more than the mind remembering timestreams that have already collapsed or are running concurrently to the one we live in,” as though the debates about the topic had not been between himself and Albus.

“In short,” Albus said, “she is too far into the past to risk the Ministry’s traditional method of dealing with this sort of situation, if it has ever happened, but we have no way to determine how her presence will affect this world until it happens.”

Janus frowned. “Perhaps.” There was something in his look that caught Albus’ interest; if Janus weren’t such a talented Occlumens, Albus might have been tempted to try to scan him. “I would like to do further research before I commit to any one course of action, and I refuse to make any sort of decision without speaking to the girl, first.”

“A sensible answer,” Albus agreed, and one that left him with an opportunity to learn more about the future she came from. “Perhaps I should reach out to Nicholas,” he added, dropping the famous alchemist’s name like a sherbet lemon in his friend’s path. “He has lived for centuries, and he is famously private; he also hoards information that he’s deemed too dangerous to get into the hands of the modern magical society.” Oh, it burned Albus that his old mentor included him in that, even as he acknowledged that the old man had a point.

“Thank you, Albus,” Janus said, standing to put his tea cup on the small table between the arm chairs. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll return to the Department to hunt down some of the more esoteric tomes. I will await your owl regarding Master Flamel, and place myself at his disposal.”

Albus walked the other man to the Floo where they said absent-minded goodbyes, one man returning to his chosen career and the other to his place behind the desk, both deep in thought. There was an unspoken agreement of secrecy about the girl’s presence. In the wrong hands, her knowledge could be used to the destruction of all that both men had worked towards.


End file.
